The Social Justice Warrior movement has hit Yale and hit it hard. Weeks ago a Yale official sent an email asking people to not freak out about what they consider to be racially insensitive Halloween costumes.
This was the response:
We posted earlier one Yale student’s response where she wrote, “…I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”
More about the story from the Washington Post:
They also condemned an e-mail from the associate master of Silliman College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential communities, to Silliman residents that argued that people should not be offended by insensitive Halloween costumes and should instead tolerate them and talk about them. That message came in response to a plea from Yale officials that the university community “take the time to consider their costumes and the impact it may have,” citing possible outfits including “feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing ‘war paint’ or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface.”
The associate master, Erika Christakis, wrote to the campus community criticizing efforts to proscribe certain types of dress, particularly for young people, while also noting: “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation.”
“I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours,” wrote Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and the wife of Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician and the master of Silliman College. “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Students at Thursday’s protest said the e-mail ignored the way people of color experience such insensitive characterizations, and they recounted how students have faced threats of physical violence when they have questioned their classmates’ costume choices.
“There was so much coded language in that e-mail that is just disrespectful,” said Ewurama Okai, a junior.
Incredible. These are the leaders of tomorrow.
It really makes me tremble for the future of America.